ME is a simple word but it takes a lifetime to find the words that go with it. I had a library version of myself – a sound hardback copy of ME that the public could borrow and read. And then they were sure that they knew me, and then I felt safe. Elsewhere, in a drawer, was the ME I was writing, quietly, and alone. It wasn’t much of an adventure, t

I like looking back into rooms filled with people. I like the silent-movie feel of it. I used to do it when I was a girl, watching my parents and sisters, knowing they couldn’t see me. Now, in the crisp, starry air, I looked in and saw my party, my friends, laughing, animated. I smiled to myself. This is what it means to have friends; this ease, th

As I come apart, remember less, know less, am less, my life isn’t flashing before me, it’s fading. I am a light out at sea. I am a star disappearing at dawn. I am trying to follow myself and I can’t. One thing is clear – whatever death is, it isn’t a continuation of self – myself – in the way I imagined my lived-life to be. Self seems like it’s a s

No Ghost Ghost Story What kind of a ghost story has no ghost? Towards the end of your life, you promised me that if it were possible, you would send a sign, a sign to let me know that somewhere out there is the person I love. A person recognisable as you. I am sitting at my garden table watching the night. As I type this, I hope the keyboard starts

They ate by candlelight – it should have been romantic, but the shadows sat at the table with them, two candles hardly lighting their plates. In the gloom each of them looked different, and gradually they became different.

‘Who is this?’ ‘Don’t you recognise my voice?’ ‘Yes …’ ‘I am your JohnApp. Check your home screen. I’m fully installed. I can call you and message you, just like before. Think of me as your AlwaysApp.’

As Samuel Johnson put it, back in the eighteenth century: ‘All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.’

People who didn’t live as long as we do – people who were often dead in their fifties – understood both distance and apartness in a way that we don’t. All travel is time travel. So, I try to think of this absence from you as a long separation. I must take care of the house and garden, and I am trying my best. You liked things neat and elegant. Taki

Back home, we had no inside bathroom. The toilet was in the yard next to the coal-shed. Both were full of black spiders, which wasn’t the spiders’ natural colour. Everything in the 1960s was coal-washed.